Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash
The best thing I read in the last week was No Gods, No Masters by Justin Hanagan. By best, I mean it resonated with me the most strongly, has stuck with me the most stubbornly, and was clear and well-written and sardonic and optimistic. I’m also a bit of Huxley fanboy, and talking about the internet on the internet is my type of Russian nesting doll. Of all the timeless problems worth thinking and reading about, the most pressing and promising social question of the moment is something like: “internet?” That’s not me flogging the “current thing,” it’s a genuinely enduring issue.
I like the piece because it underscores something that is self-evident to the degree that we spend our time in cyberspace (a much more punk rock term than the metaverse): that the incentives of the internet suck. This is a problem because of how much of life the internet encompasses, or seems to, how deeply into the everyday it seeps, and how its presence silently looms over much of IRL experience. Hanagan writes that “nobody needs the internet.” While that’s technically true, the fact that he addresses the problem so directly and eloquently suggests that he’s aware of the flagrant, sometimes suffocating (though technically unnecessary) weight of the internet on our collective minds.
Hanagan places much responsibility for these bad incentives on the machinations of capitalism, though with an air of frank diagnosis, rather than a tired, superficially radical frame. Of course, he’s right about this, but I want to argue that capitalism is actually failing to do its thing effectively in this case. The proliferation of options to simply purchase a better internet experience has thus far come up short, and consumers have failed to demand such options because of hollow, unrealistic expectations that fail to appreciate this brave new world suffusing with connectivity.
Norms and limbic capitalism
After reading this piece, I quickly discovered Hanagan’s other work, particularly a brilliant piece where he highlights a concept of limbic capitalism, which is the provision of goods or services which satisfy cravings. Cravings, as opposed to needs or thick desires, can be satisfied by the profane, the tawdry, or the absurd. Cravings can be cheaply addressed, and are most conveniently or carnally demolished by junk food, metaphorical or otherwise. We typically don’t crave a nice healthy salad (unless I’ve eaten 4 fried meals consecutively), but we might crave a candy bar or a cigarette. Limbic capitalism satisfies these cravings alone, and through satisfying them recreates them. I think this concept is very useful.
It’s particularly useful with respect to the junk food analogy. While we all have junk food available, whether at the drive through or the interior aisles of the grocery store, we recognize that there are healthier alternatives. Yes, they’re more expensive, harder to find, trickier to prepare, and so on. They require greater personal labor, more expensive grocery or restaurant bills, and a more alert, frosty awareness of the pitfalls and temptations of the nutritional landscape. While I hesitate to make a strong claim about the norms of junk food, people with the means and desires to prioritize their health and wellness tend to be willing to pay these costs. I’m talking both about people who care a great deal about being hot or MAXIMIZING PERFORMANCE but also just normal middle class people who don’t want to feel like shit, both physically in their bodies and psychologically in their minds, about their bodies.
I hesitate to delineate strict norms because its uncouth to explicitly judge someone for eating fast food or smashing a snickers bar every day after lunch. But there is kind of an unspoken, implicit assumption that one ought not do that. The food thing hasn’t come as far as smoking, but it’s there under the surface. One would expect their friends, even their colleagues to tell them to quit smoking. Maybe only the (closer versions of) the former would be comfortable telling you to stop eating garbage.
In any case, this long windup is simply to surface the distinct lack of explicit norms in the realm of online life. Where they do exist they tend to proscribe the obviously extreme or align with some external institutional motivation: don’t watch NSFW content on a train or in a restaurant. Your employer reminds you to use their network and hardware responsibly. Otherwise, there are nods to outlining appropriate phone usage, and some excellent discussion of digital detoxing and smartphone hiatus on Substack, but these developments are inchoate and need more concretizing and dissemination. I think that’s exact the budding tradition of norming that Hanagan is contributing to. The practice is still shedding a flavor of teenage-smartphone-chaperoning. But it’s an unequivocally positive development, if for no other reason than we need norms to help us self-govern behavior, like scrolling, that come along with temptation and even risk.
I’m not paying for a blue check
The capitalist internet may be failing us by providing cheap expressions which satisfy our limbic desires. To return to the food analogy, it can seem like all we can get is junk. I would argue that the menu of options for online life, which has ostensibly shrunk in the last decade, is leaving a great deal of potential profit on the table. More and better ways to pay for a healthier, cleaner, less cluttered internet would lead to both improved experience and better incentives.
Many of the options to pay for a better internet feel stuck in this same limbic mode I’ve been discussing. YouTube, for example, wants me to pay to not have ads and to be able to watch videos with my phone closed. Neither of those are worth much to me. What I wish I could pay for is a YouTube without “shorts,” which are transplanted TikTok videos that delete my time in a generally deeply unsatisfying way. It’s like purchasing the wholesome vegetables of the magnificent educational capacity of YouTube comes along with free (mandatory!) packs of candy and cheese puffs. The same goes for Instagram: let me have an experience which I wanted to sign up for, which is mostly seeing curated photos of people I used to know getting engaged. I don’t want to be tempted by the void of Instagram reels. It’s not that I’m powerless to resist, I’d just rather not have to think about the decision at all.
Twitter (I’m still going to call it Twitter for now), last time I checked, only accepts payment for “X Premium,” which would give me a checkmark and some added features: editing tweets, better video quality uploads, and priority views for other readers. Unfortunately, while those might help one build an audience or communicate, all but the 50% reduction in ads fail to meaningfully address the problems of the user experience. I don’t have any great ideas for how it can be fixed, how the incentives for flamethrowing toxicity might be curbed, but people might be willing to pay for the possibility.
Expectation and prices
A big reason for the lack of these better capitalistic options is expectations. Many of us somehow expect information to be free on the internet, because there is so much of it. There are countless places to go to get free news, free analysis, and access to stimulating conversation. The sheer availability of so much information, from astonishingly reliable Wikipedia articles to classic works in the public domain, overwhelms other, paid channels of supply. And since we expect information to come freely, the major players of the internet sneak in limbic attractors to monetize our attention through other means.
I face this problem constantly. I subscribe to far too many Substack newsletters to reasonably keep up with. Many of these keep some of their work behind a paywall, the passing through of which feels like a more expensive burden than it otherwise might, given the overflowing availability of free alternatives. This is an illusion, of course, as the value of a single well-written essay is not directly comparable to a billion free tweets, even if they occupy the same amount of time in consumption.
Moreover, signing up for any kind of subscription feels like more of a commitment than purchasing a one-time good or service, like lunch. Even though we know we can cancel at any time, signing up for a free trial to watch a single movie feels more onerous than simply purchasing or renting the movie outright. This hidden cost, whether one wants to take it seriously or not, distorts the demand curve for a better online experience.
Equally, the cluttered, oftentimes unusable atmosphere of many “free” sources of information hides the costs of the user experience behind a ceaseless stream of advertisements. While not everyone wants to pay for the reader-friendly experience of say, the New Yorker, the tendency to gravitate towards the ubiquitous and “free” content creates an emergent atmosphere online that’s less usable than otherwise might obtain. The experience feels cheap, because it is cheap.
All of this adds together to severely underestimate the willingness of users, consumers, and readers to simply purchase a better internet. It takes up a huge portion of our lives, but we still somehow don’t want to pay for it.
Limbic capitalism is a great way to describe how much marketing appeals to what we want rather than what we need. I too would pay for features that scrub these thin desires from my user experience on the internet. I foresee this demand growing as more and more people recognize and vocalize the drawbacks of social media and the internet. Great essay Chip - ideas like this inspire us to make the world a better place
The internet is comprised of layers. Your experience on the internet is generally highly customizable. The barrier to the internet you desire is partly technical and partly convenience.
The $1000 super computer in your hand with locked firmware is preventing you from customizing that experience, largely because they are deferent to developers, perhaps rightfully so.
Much of this could be addressed at the application layer, but as you correctly note, the incentives are misaligned. Application developers companies can build in the ability to hide certain features, and charge a premium for said services. Hybrid payment systems (usage based & fixed rate for services) is on the rise in enterprise software. The future you envision is an eventuality.
That being said, this discourse is valuable, and I am sure this conversation is occurring on some UX/UI forum. Because yeah the internet as most consumers use it is a bit dystopian.